INDUSTRIAL IOT USE CASE: HEALTHCARE

THE ERA OF PREDICTIVE MEDICINE BEGINS

THE CHALLENGE

While the field of healthcare is brimming with innovation, the pace of adoption has been slow since stakes are high. In matters of life and death, new medical devices must be FDA approved by being meticulously tested in multiple environments and demonstrate a proven track record of ultra-reliability before widespread use can begin.

This is why bedside monitoring stations, for example, have remained largely unchanged for so long—an imposing jumble of multiple machines, flashing lights, and tangled wires. And most of these monitoring devices operate completely independently and must be manually checked by hospital staff. It's only when an alarm sounds that a doctor or nurse knows something is wrong.

But patients are demanding better care while physicians and healthcare providers are praising the benefits of predictive medicine. What if there were a way to take whole medical systems—not just monitoring stations but the real-time data from an entire hospital network or the results of a new batch of clinical drug trials—and feed everything into a central location to better monitor patients and practice truly predictive medicine?

Managing the risk of introducing new medical devices

Centralizing patient and hospital system monitoring

Practicing predictive medicine in real time

THE SOLUTION

With Wind River® Titanium Control, the first fully integrated network virtualization platform, healthcare providers can now virtualize the thousands of medical devices used across a hospital system. Instead of having multiple independent, isolated machines requiring manual monitoring, a cluster of bedside monitors now becomes a single node on an Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) operating platform. Medical professionals can monitor, aggregate, and act on medical data in real time.

Imagine a patient connected to just a few carefully placed Bluetooth sensors that report everything from EKG to blood sugar level to a centralized location. The data could be analyzed for immediate action and even sent on to the tablet of a trusted doctor or relative. In addition, data from an entire medical station or even an entire hospital network could be aggregated to provide insights into new treatments and suggest preventive measures.

With Wind River Helix™ Device Cloud, new devices can be tested, validated, and updated easily and remotely via a robust, on-premises, cloud-based IoT platform. System upgrades are pushed out instantly, enabling patient care to keep pace with the latest technology. And with VxWorks® at the core of billions of embedded systems, including FDA Class I, II, and III devices for a broad array of medical needs, healthcare professionals know that innovative new medical devices—whether next-generation prosthetics, artificial discs, or smart stents and valves—will work seamlessly with their platform.

Healthcare, get ready for a quantum leap forward.

More Use Cases

Energy

Energy

The world's leading oil companies and energy producers will achieve unprecedented efficiency by virtualizing the control systems in refineries and power plants, permanently reducing the cost of upgrades.